The Sri Lankan Army appears to be on the brink of a military victory that would bring to an end one of Asia's longest and bloodiest civil wars. Yesterday government troops were advancing on Elephant Pass, the strategic former army base at the entry to Jaffna. Last week they captured Kilinochchi, the town in the far north of the island declared by Tamil Tigers rebels as their separatist capital. With the troops poised to capture the remaining rebel territory, President Rajapaksa's hawkish Government is already trumpeting its success in ending a rebellion that years of negotiations by Norwegian intermediaries failed to accommodate.

The triumphalist note, however, is as ominous as the accompanying brutality. Yesterday the editor of a newspaper strongly critical of the Government's war on the Tigers was shot dead by motorcycle gunmen. The shooting came just two days after unidentified attackers set fire to a private television station denounced by state media as “unpatriotic” for its coverage of the ethnic conflict. There are widespread fears that the Government, which won power by appealing to Sinhalese nationalists, will follow any victory with a crackdown on civil liberties, an uncompromising attempt to crush Tamil sentiment and a refusal of any cultural or political autonomy.

Such a move would spell further disaster for Sri Lanka. Churchill's axiom of magnanimity in victory was never more needed. Over the past 25 years, at least 70,000 people have been killed in a war marked by appalling terrorist brutality, especially the widespread use of child fighters and the forced recruitment of suicide bombers. Directed by the reclusive and uncompromising Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have deliberately worsened conditions for civilians under their control, killed moderates and rival Tamil politicians and done their best to sabotage Oslo's patient efforts to negotiate a political settlement.

In this, they have been helped by hardliners among the Sinhalese majority, long suspicious of peace efforts made especially eight years ago by Ranil Wickremasinghe. Then the Prime Minister, he signed a ceasefire with the Tigers in 2001 and began peace talks. During the lull, the battered economy revived and Sri Lanka underwent huge social changes. But the Tigers, fearing a loss of political control, abruptly withdrew from the peace process in 2003, and the Sinhalese majority turned against reconciliation. With calculated cycnicism, the Tigers then enforced a boycott among Tamils during the last general election, knowing that this would help the return of hardliners to power in Colombo - as it did.

Without reconciliation, however, Sri Lanka will find it hard to overcome more than a generation of civil war. The Tigers, and especially their intransigent leader, have no interest in accommodation. But the government decision on Wednesday to proscribe the LTTE again will drive them farther underground and reinforce the zealotry of a dictatorial leadership. The Tigers, already outlawed in America and the European Union, will step up urban terrorism across the island and their financial blackmail of Tamils overseas.

An end to a war that has blighted a country's once prosperous future cannot come too soon. But that end must herald peace, not vengeance, triumphalism and an assault on civil liberties.